Archive for the ‘Enterprise Search’ Category

01: Charting the HP – Autonomy Deal

If you have been following the coverage of HP’s proposed acquisition of Autonomy, then you’ve likely picked up on a handful of repeated phrases, including “big data” “data science” and “information management.” Some terms are new, some are old, but each describes what enterprises are increasingly wrestling to control and leverage – namely, unstructured information. As HP looks to its software future while shedding its hardware past, it’s clear it views Autonomy as the first piece in addressing the big data problem.

From our perspective, we see the acquisition as validation of ISYS’s strategy of helping enterprises and technology partners manage and exploit their unstructured content assets. Further supporting this is the significant growth we have seen in our ISYS Document Filters technology, which is helping technology partners like MarkLogic, Sybase and Attensity account for unstructured information in their content applications. Below you will find a handful of perspectives on this deal, from analysts to subject matter experts. Leslie Owens of Forrester offers a thorough analysis and a view on some of the challenges ahead.

• What is Autonomy Without its Marketing? (Leslie Owens, Forrester)
• HP Rumored to be Buying UK’s Autonomy for 10b (Dave Kellogg, Kellblog)
• Autonomy Marketing, Meet HP (Miles Kehoe, Enterprise Search Blog)

02: Make a Difference With ISYS

At last – an opportunity to give back! 

I don’t know about you, but I have often found myself in a rather awkward position throughout my career. 

As someone with school aged children, I have found myself approached on numerous occasions in my capacity as an employee of various IT organisations, with the simple request – “Is your organisation able to help us out with IT equipment or expertise?” 

More often than not, I have found myself having to deliver answers that are negative or excuses such as “sorry, our company does not donate equipment, we recycle everything” leaving me somewhat frustrated that this is something that I haven’t been able to impact.  That is, until now.

ISYS has launched a new initiative “Make a Difference” which at last enables IT employees and organisations to “give back” to their local schools.  

By migrating from Oracle (Outside In) or Autonomy (KeyView) with our Migration Program, ISYS not only ensures an organisation achieves a better product and service at a lower price, we will “Make a Difference” of $2,500 for IT to a local school of that organisation’s choice. *

At last I can attend my children’s local school and give a positive response when approached to assist them with their IT needs.  It’s great to be able to make a difference!

* ISYS will make an equivalent donation in other currencies for companies based outside the US

03: The kids are alright?

As a working mother, my ability to consume and process data and information is driven by a busy lifestyle that seems to be all too common these days. Whilst I rarely miss the opportunity to beat the ‘working Mum’ drum as the reason for my hectic life, it does seem like we are all working longer hours and trying to squeeze every last ounce of productivity we can: work-life integration rather than work-life balance. 

I often read or hear about the ‘information explosion’ – particularly in relation to so-called unstructured data; and how this is materially affecting our ability to function and make decisions, whether professional or personal.

It makes me wonder whether the hardware and software that is such a part of everyday life is struggling to keep up, just as we mere mortals are.

My eldest son is 14 years old, and as yet relatively unaware of the huge explosion going on around him. Or, so I thought.

My experience of spending long hours with him preparing for what will be  non-stop assessment and exams over the next  two years suggests that he simply doesn’t accept anything but excellence from the technology that is meant to support him during this intense period of work.

OK, he expects that the technology will work. But he also expects to find all the information he’s looking for – quickly and easily – no matter where that information sits. He expects the technology to deliver relevance, variance, and all in a standardised format.

To accommodate this information, he can access 32Gb on his iPod, 64Gb on his iPad; and several hundred on his desktop.  He also has access to the hard drive on our Sky+ box, capacity on two other computers and three other mobile devices in the house. That’s more storage capacity than the bank I worked for many years ago had in its climate-controlled server room.

As I work every day with users today, I see people having to make decisions based on incomplete data; who spend hours searching for information and then compiling and standardising their results.

It makes me wonder how things will change as a new generation of working professionals demand far greater precision, relevance and speed from the software that enables them to make complete sense of the information around them.

I believe our children will neither accept the continuation of this increasingly problematic and painful situation; nor (I hope) add to it. As they move into the workplace, they will find effective ways to better consume and utilise the information they need. It means that the software providers and those who run and manage the technology world will need to seriously raise their game.

The kids will demand it.

04: Embrace the revolution – Part 1

As a child growing up in the 1970’s, content was a state of well-being. Eating, playing with friends and watching TV in the evenings.  

Fast forward 40 years and content has become something you create, view, buy, sell, download, modify, store and share. There’s a huge amount of it. It’s everywhere and everybody seems to be caught up in it. We are in the midst of an information explosion. Except this explosion is unique, because the effects are multiplying by the day.

For enterprises, trying to maintain some kind of coherent structure over their information is a huge and ongoing challenge. It takes time and can cost a lot of money.

But however well-organized and structured the information is, it is today only a small part of the total picture. Why? Because of user-generated content – the stuff that individuals within (and outside) your enterprise create, duplicate and share every single day.

It is by definition unstructured. The outcome of behaviours, processes and activities that are often meant to foster creativity and add value. But which inevitably stretch and evolve established information boundaries and taxonomies.

Add to that the proliferation of storage locations beyond the desktop (e.g. tablets, phones, USB drives) and the issue of information ‘find-ability’ becomes increasingly acute. Think of this as finding precisely the needle you need in a haystack that is growing exponentially.

As enterprises, we need to be realistic about what information we can directly structure and organise. The balance has shifted and up to 90% of all content today is unstructured.

Regardless of where it might reside, we need to be able to (virtually) aggregate content together in a way that allows us to be very precise about what we are seeking; and to do something meaningful with what we find.

The Scout Motto ‘Be prepared’ has never been more prescient. 

The revolution is already here, so embrace it and maybe even learn to love it.

Accept that you can’t store, structure and classify everything. Instead, use the right enterprise search technology to virtually aggregate all the critical sources of information you need to help enable more informed decision-making.

By doing so, you might not have to go through that physical (and very painful) legacy migration exercise you’d been planning.  

If that’s not an option, you can at least do it at your own pace, so that users aren’t affected by the move because they still have a uniform, single point of access – regardless of where the information really ‘lives’.

More on that in Part 2…

05: Join the ISYS Community Exchange

As a company that has signed more than 15,000 customer organizations since inception 22 years ago, ISYS has fostered connections with thousands of individuals who have worked with search technology in general, and ISYS specifically.  Given the ability of LinkedIn to connect this user community with ISYS and with each other, we have established the ISYS Community Exchange — our new LinkedIn user group.

We invite you to join the group, connect with ISYS experts and with other ISYS users via the group’s forums.  ISYS staffers post regular updates about recent events and news, making it an ideal place to stay informed of the latest and greatest ISYS happenings.

We look forward to connecting with you all.

06: ISYS Upgrades Enterprise Search Software to v9.6

Today we bring you fantastic news that Version 9.6 of the ISYS Enterprise Search Software suite is now available.  Noted below are just a handful of the key enhancements, including automatic language detection, early binding security and significant increases in indexing performance.  Maintenance customers wishing to upgrade or parties interested in learning more can visit our ISYS 9.6 overview page and request additional information.

For this cycle, we focused on capabilities that would meet next-generation federated search requirements.  Given our exclusive focus on enterprise search infrastructure and embedded search solutions, we identified the following three areas as key to our customers’ success:

Language Support
To ease the findability of critical corporate intelligence, we introduced Automatic Language Detection, which instantly recognizes documents in 36 different languages. The benefit to end users is the ability to refine results based on a given language, or include a pre-query filter to restrict searches to a specific language. Also new in 9.6 is the ability to extend stemming to French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian and Russian.

Security
To cater for broad security requirements, ISYS has introduced “early binding” document-level security for file systems, which ensures:

• High-performance secure search (no penalty for filtering unauthorized documents)
• Result counts are 100% accurate on the first result page
• Refinement facets only available for authorized documents

Performance
In lab tests using a typical mix of corporate content, ISYS 9.6 achieved indexing speeds of 100 gigabytes per hour. Our enhancements at the text extraction level have enabled us to see an average indexing speed increase of 3x.

Learn more about ISYS 9.6 and request additional information.

07: Security and Enterprise Search

Historically, enterprise search vendors have done a poor job addressing the subject of security.  In some cases, vendors didn’t have a good enough answer (and some are still struggling), hence the reason for the radio silence on the topic.  But in the main, I think we merely took the topic for granted and made assumptions that security would just be “taken care of” in the natural course of IT management.

With the continued rise in bigger and broader federated search deployments, security is only becoming more important, and as a result we’re doing more in terms of educating enterprises on the topic.  Our latest effort is a technical white paper titled, “The Principles of Security Management in the Context of Secure Search.”  While this paper won’t serve as a “how-to” manual on the subject of secure search, it does provide a suitable framework for better understanding the topic and ensuring your security managers are comfortable with the requirements.

08: Forget “Search” — It Is All About The “Virtual Aggregation” Of Data

I mentioned in a post late last year that 2010 would be the year of federated search, but now I think we need to go even further …

The number of record and content management systems that are coming onto the market (and the investment that is being made by vendors and customers alike) is simply staggering.  In isolation, a large number of these systems are good applications; some are even great … with some tremendous functionality.  But having spent time at the HP TRIM User Forum (TUF23) in Sydney last week, I can say they all have one thing in common – they require end users to know where content is in order to find it.

Think about this for a minute … if you know your content is in HP TRIM, then the search in TRIM will allow you to find what you are looking for, same if you know your content is in SharePoint.  However, no matter what role you have in an organisation, chances are you will interact with more than one of these data repositories.  From an enterprise perspective we cannot continue to expect our users to know where information lives.

The issue today is that data needs to live in different places.  These different repositories are purpose-built for the type of information that they contain.  The term “federated search” does not really do the concept justice … more accurately, what we are doing with federated search is providing users with the ability to find information by “virtually aggregating data” or allowing users to ask for some information that is likely scattered across multiple repositories.  

We can even take this one step further, following on from the commentary about “physical” data aggregation projects that are being embarked upon in Europe and the US after some high-profile information failures.  If you have a physical data aggregation project going on in your organisation, stop right now and see if there is a better way to accomplish the end result you are looking for. 

We can wrestle with terminology all we want (CMSWatch’s Theresa Regli recently presented some great thoughts on the related topic of “enterprise search” vs “federated search”), as long as we all agree that the true benefit of this technology is to locate and leverage information where it resides.

09: Ben Franklin and the Evolution of Enterprise Search

Given how prolific he was, Ben Franklin could have very easily invented enterprise search in his day.  That is, if he hadn’t been so busy with everything else.  And even though he had an incredible mind, not even he could have fully appreciated what a game-changer electricity would be.  Today, we only consciously acknowledge electricity when we have none; otherwise it’s primarily an afterthought, despite the fact that harnessing and generating this power remains one of humankind’s greatest achievements.

Reflecting on this brought to mind a conversation I had with Sue Feldman of IDC some years ago.  During our discussion, she made a statement to the effect of, “Some day, search will be analogous to electricity.  When you turn on a light, you don’t think about electricity; you just focus on the fact that something has been illuminated for you.”  Perhaps others have viewed search in a similar fashion, but it’s an analogy that made perfect sense at the time and is even more fitting today.

While I can’t speak for the entire industry, the types of deals ISYS has been doing in recent months are more and more inline with this analogy.  Whether we’re talking about embedded search, or search as an application, slowly but surely search appears to be moving away from just a blank search box and into a world where search is primarily an enabling technology.  In that sense, enterprise search is neither the destination nor the journey … it’s merely the light that enables you to proceed with whatever it is you were doing in the first place.

10: Visit Us at LegalTech New York

I’ve been to New York City more than a dozen times in the last seven years, and it never gets old, even in February.  ISYS, as a company, has been traveling to NYC for the LegalTech event since 1994, which means it has been 16 years since we first started connecting more deeply with law firms and other software vendors looking to round out their technology with embedded search.  If you’ll be in town for the event, please stop by Booth #329 and say hello to the team.

What makes LegalTech pretty unique is the commaraderie of the event.  Maybe it’s because our focus is on connecting with our fellow exhibitors, but we always leave the event smarter than when we arrived.  We’ve never approached it as a hard sales exercise; we’re there to learn as much as the next guy and gal, so from that standpoint it’s refreshing.  For those of you who have direct legal responsibilities, or for those who are on the periphery dealing with corporate compliance and risk issues, I’d love to hear what you’re looking to get out of LegalTech this time around.  From our point of view, we’re still quite focused on embedded search for traditional ISVs/OEMs as well as SaaS providers, but we’re also increasingly engaging in conversations regarding early case assessment with commercial organizations.

For an event of this size to still be highly relevant, it’s clear these issues remain quite acute.  As always, I’m looking forward to it, so we hope to see you next week.  As a reminder, the event is at the Hilton New York, from Feb. 1-3.  I believe the folks at American Lawyer Media are offering a complimentary exhibit hall pass if you want to drop in for an afternoon.